Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Cartoon Unrest

I thought Andrew Sullivan in New Republic really captured a lot of my feelings on this ongoing unrest in certain segments of the Muslim world. As your prototypical bleeding heart liberal, I will openly admit that when a conflict arises with people from a different place, I am likely to have sympathy for them simply because I can't presume to understand their perspective on the world. But this continuing rioting over those silly cartoons strikes as so ridiculous, and a really poor reflection on what a bunch of angry idiots just looking for a reason to act like thugs a lot of people in that world are. This is not our fault. I repeat, this is not our fault. Freedom of expression is a good thing. We don't have to apologize for political satire done by people we have nothing to do with. That is their right in a free society. And anyone should be able to understand the notion of individual agency. So someone disrespects your religion? Who cares? If you truly believe, that just makes them an idiot, and means they are probably going to hell. Why do you have an obligation to kill them, or destroy things that are only tangentially related to them? And as Sullivan points out in the aforementioned article, the whole thing is so hypocritical given anti-American and anti-Semitic cartoons are common in the Muslim world. Some of those people clearly hold themselves to a different standard than they do others. The worst thing of it all is that the underlying message of the most offensive cartoons should be widely accepted as wrong. It's not fair to blame Islam for terrorism given there are more peaceful Muslims than Islamic terrorists by a very wide margin. But the people burning buildings over a freaking cartoon are making people like me, who want to believe that underlying message is wrong, question whether in fact it is.